On this day 36 years ago, April 18, 1990 President Bush’s conference finishes,
Shortly thereafter President Bush invited representatives of the 20 most influential countries in the world to a White House conference on science an economics research related to global change (17-18 April, 1990, in Washington). Even though the FAR would soon be completed and was intended to serve as the basis for negotiating a climate convention, no invitation to attend the conference was extended to the IPCC. I was surprised and sought an explanation through my contact in the USA (Dr Robert Corell) and I was soon thereafter invited to attend. For the first time I sensed that the IPCC messages might be disturbing the formulation of a US policy about these matters.
(Bolin, 2007: 59-60)
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 354ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Republican politicians, presidents and vice presidents, – looking at you, Reagan and Bush – had been ignoring carbon dioxide build up. There had been a real warning and a real opportunity to do something meaningful back when it was still possible in 1977-81. That opportunity was ignored.
The specific context was that in 1988 George Bush, running for president and vulnerable on environment matters because he hadn’t done anything, (his Democratic opponent, Michael Dukakis, who kind of sort of had), announced that people who were worried about the greenhouse effect were forgetting about the “White House effect”, and that if he were to be president, he (Bush) would in his first year in office, convene an International Meeting on what to do about it. Well, Bush had won the 1988 election handily, and then guess what, did not hold the International Conference.
And when he did finally hold the international conference, he somehow, his people somehow “forgot” to invite the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Swedish scientist Bert Bolin. Funny that.
What I think we can learn from this is that people like George Bush are hopefully rotting in hell for many reasons, climate change denial and obstruction being near the top of the list.
What happened next: Bolin died in 2007 having lived long enough to see the IPCC get the Nobel Peace Prize, and to have the hope that, who knows, maybe, in Copenhagen, in two years time, there would be a meaningful global deal, and there wasn’t.
Thirty three years ago, on this day, April 17th, 1993,
The Prime Minister, Paul Keating, and the Minister for Primary Industries and Energy, Simon Crean, have denied knowledge of alleged Treasury proposals for a $1.9 billion energy tax.
Mr Crean rejected reports in The Weekend Australian and The Age on Saturday [17 April] which suggested that a tax on the energy content or fuels and possibly carbon emissions, being discussed by Treasury and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, had drawn on studies by the Department of Primary Industries and Energy.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 357ppm. As of 2026 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that the anti-greenhouse action forces had won famous victories in 1991 and 1992, watering down the National Greenhouse Response Strategy and the Ecologically Sustainable Development process to derisory levels. However, they knew that, because of international ratification of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the battle would not be going away…
The Business Council of Australia and others were paying very close attention to what was happening in the United States under Bill Clinton and the BTU tax, and also what was happening and Europe, where carbon tax had been defeated there.
I don’t know who leaked what to force Keating and Crean into this public statement, but the obvious question is cui bono? And a leak like this, feeding a story to tame journalists (there is rarely another kind sadly) means that you get to fire a shot across the bows of the pro-tax crowd. But of course, suppressing fire, as anyone who’s been in a proper fire fight will tell you, doesn’t really work.
What I think we can learn from this is that there are always games, wheels within wheels, you name it. This is one of them. We learn that 33 years ago, the straightforward, surely uncontroversial proposition that you tax things that are harmful in order to discourage their use and to encourage the creation of alternatives, was beyond the pale (Keating really hated the greenies).
What happened next
Well, there was an environment minister called Ros Kelly. She had to resign. Her replacement was another guy who knew all about the issues, the late Graham Richardson, he had to resign, quit, I forget which. And then Senator John Faulkner came along… And in early 1994 was saying, “Yeah, we might be looking at a carbon tax.”
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
“Australia is preparing to host a major international meeting of environment ministers to broaden global acceptance of forests as a source of carbon credits.
But the meeting comes at a time when the ability of forests to actually generate these credits is increasingly in scientific doubt.
The High Level Forum on Sinks will be held in Perth from April 17-20.”
Hordern, N. 2000. Australia pushes carbon sinks. The Australian Financial Review, March 3, p.16.
And
Australia is being accused of deliberately “stacking” a conference of international environment ministers in Perth next week in a bid to undermine the global goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The conference, starting on Monday, is about the use of “sinks” or the planting of trees to gain credits, a suggestion under the Kyoto Protocol which could be used to offset countries’ inability to reduce emissions from industry and motor vehicles.
Australia has invited ministers from around the world, but stands accused of inviting only countries sympathetic to its own position on sinks.
Germany and other European countries which are of the view that overuse of sinks could encourage countries not to reduce emissions have been left out.
An Australian Greenhouse Office paper on the conference reveals that only “key members of the European Union”, Finland, France, the UK and The Netherlands, were invited.
Greenpeace’s international policy director, Mr Bill Hare, yesterday accused the Federal Government of stacking the conference. Mr Hare said Tuvalu and other Pacific nations were also not invited, when small Pacific States were likely to be most in danger from sea level rises caused by the greenhouse effect.
Clennel, A. 2000. Greenhouse Gas Conference `stacked’. Sydney Morning Herald, April 15, p.15.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 369ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that Australia’s political elites had been warned about carbon dioxide build up as a problem, repeatedly, by scientists, by spooks, by journalists, by politicians, and they had ignored it all. They had carved themselves a spectacular deal at the Kyoto conference, and there were a whole load of people who wanted to make money from selling carbon credits, plant a tree in Australia and get paid for doing so by some Japanese or Korean polluter who doesn’t want to cut their own emissions. Ker-ching!
The only fly in that ointment being that for you to be able to engage in carbon trading, your country’s government would have to have ratified Kyoto. Now at this point, it wasn’t clear what would happen, because if the Americans did ratify Kyoto, the pressure on the Australians to do so would be enormous.
And therefore it made sense, in 2000 to be holding these sorts of conferences and pushing these sorts of lines.
A year later, once the Bush administration had pulled out that particular balloon lost all its air. Though, it’s fair to say as well that the so-called Sydney’s Futures Exchange didn’t even last that long.
What I think we can learn from this is that some people dreamed of global carbon trading. Never happened.
What happened next: Bush pulled out of Kyoto. Australia pulled out of Kyoto. Kyoto looked dead. The whole carbon credits thing looked dead. And then in 2004 Russia Duma ratified the Kyoto Protocol, bringing it into force and the whole UNFCCC circus sprang/staggered back into life.
Around 150 people gathered outside the Adelaide Convention Centre to ‘welcome’ delegates to the Annual General Meeting of the oil and gas company Santos. Marc Hudson investigates.
The Adelaide Convention Centre sits on North Terrace. The only thing between it and the South Australian parliament is a railway station. I mention this because in September 1977 there was an election for the right to sit in that parliament. During that election questions of mining, and energy, were high on the agenda.
One party – we will come back to which – had the following as its policy statement on this.
Fast-forward 49 years and Santos, (an acronym for South Australia and Northern Territory Oil Search) the oil and gas company that some say has a disproportionate influence on South Australia’s politics, is holding its Annual General Meeting. Around 200 people gathered for a protest rally organised by a group of environmental and social justice organisations including the Australian Conservation Foundation, Action Aid and the Conservation Council of South Australia.
Under the watchful (and occasionally baleful) eye of plentiful South Australian police, delegates and protestors shared the same escalator up to the entrance of the convention centre.
Four protestors, in mock business suits, were on the pavement at the foot of the escalator.
All held signs and one, Ian, from Extinction Rebellion, chomped on a cigar. He explained the purpose of the protest –
“We’re here because Santos is the biggest company in South Australia. They’re having their AGM today. The shareholders will be here, and they are running programmes, projects around the country and overseas that are impacting the environment, that are impacting and overriding the rights of indigenous people. If anybody stands in front of them, they will take them to court. They’ve constantly taken indigenous people to court, and they keep appealing any decisions they lose. So we’re here to call them out. We’re here to support the First Nations people, but we’re also letting the public know that we believe Santos pays no tax. Hasn’t paid business tax for last 10 years. They pay very little money in donations to the government, and they always get what they want from government.”
(full interview transcript at the foot of this post]
Up the escalator, on the plaza outside the entrance the Convention Centre (the inevitable vast panes of glass – the banal calling card of global corporate architecture), thronged various people with placards and t-shirts bearing blunt messages (not all of them entirely safe for work). Various TV and print journalists scurried around, with police ‘liaison’ officers mingling too. (See InDaily’s report here).
There was a brief welcome to country, delivered first in a First Nations language and then in English – “Because we all family, right? Yeah, happy together. I’m strong like the ground, like the country, and we’re soft like water too. So I bring you all here in the spirit of humanity. That’s my mom’s words.”
The speeches at the rally were necessarily brief, (and there was a telling absence from the line-up, of which more later).
The MC (who did well!) was at pains to get all those present to be aware of – and repeat out loud, twice – the fact that the speakers from today’s rally would be at an event – No New Gas! Q&A with Frontline Traditional Owners and Adam Bandt – Conservation Council SA – tomorrow (Friday 17th April) at the Lion Arts Factory, 68 North Terrace, from 5.00pm, where more detail would be delivered, and more ways to be involved in the various campaigns.
Adam Bandt, formerly a member of parliament for the Australian Greens, and now CEO of the Australian Conservation Foundation, kept his remarks brief. Gas, he said, is as dirty as coal (this in response to the messaging – pushed by Santos and many others, that gas is somehow a ‘transition’ fuel). He said that gas was driving the climate crisis and pointed (as did a later speaker) to the algal bloom that is wreaking havoc on the wildlife in the oceans of South Australia (and on the livelihoods of those who rely on fishing, tourism etc). Bandt pointed to the hotter summers and ever more sever heatwaves, to waters sources being under threat. He concluded his remarks by saying that Australia has solar and wind sources that are the envy of other nations, that governments don’t go to war over solar and wind and that Australia should be aiming for energy independence. He also, – and this will not have endeared him to the delegates – proposed healthy taxation of Santos’s profits.
Adam Bandt
Next up was Uncle Jack Green, of the Northern Territory, where he and his kin have been confronting the Mcarthur River Mine. His comments were brief, but compelling. He reminded those present that the mines threaten the water, and that “we live on that water – doesn’t matter who you are, cattle, human, kangaroo.”
The next speaker was Kara Kinchella (sp?), whom I believe (will correct if wrong) of the Gomeroi traditional owners from New South Wales. A coalition of groups, made up of Gomeroi Traditional Owners, NSW Farmers, the Country Women’s Association of NSW, Unions NSW and the Lock the Gate Alliance, have created the Breeza Declaration. (can’t find online, but this is the closest I got)
Her takeaway message – “we need to get angry, before it’s too late.”
The penultimate speaker (it was clear that the event had started late, and the rally would therefore be somewhat truncated) was Joseph, from Papua New Guinea, where both Santos and the French company Total have operations. Total has managed to get permission – and here Jospeh quoted from a newspaper article ‘to discharge waste into the environment’. As he pointed out, the waste kills the fish, the prawns and poisons the land – this is a human rights abuse issue. He got a full-throated cheer from the crowd for his suggestion that “if it’s safe, take all the waste and dump it in Paris, at the Eiffel Tower.” He closed saying “Santos, you are responsible, don’t do this.”
There was a short break for a group photo, and to send the various delegates into the AGM to ask their questions. The final speaker was Kirsty Bevan, of the Conservation Council of South Australia.
She said she is often asked “why South Australia?” (with, I think, the implication in the question being that SA is a backwater and people here have the luxury of thinking that nothing they do matters) She said that she always replies that Santos has its HQ here, but also, beyond this, there problem is not one for the future but rather one of the
“crises that we’re seeing play out in front of us. It’s not a future problem, it’s a now problem, and we’re seeing extreme weather events. Our surface water temperatures in the ocean have risen by 2.5 degrees, well above the normal, which is what has resulted in the algal bloom, which we’re entering our second year.” (you can read the full transcript at the foot of this post.)
Earlier I alluded to a missing speaker. So, who was absent from the line-up? Well, this is NOT a criticism of the organisers, merely a reflection of the reality we live in – where were the union figures willing and able to speak out on the dangers of continued extraction of oil, coal and gas? There have always been tensions – sometimes managed well, sometimes not – between organised labour and environmental movements. There have been Green Bans, environmentally-inspired pushes for Full Employment, dreams of a “Green Gold Rush” around “green jobs” and climate jobs” (something Australian Conservation Foundation pushed in the early 1990s and late 2000s respectively – the second time with the peak body for Australian Trades Unions). But today, for whatever reason, no union rep was to be heard.
In 1977 Australia was in the midst of a debate about uranium mining and the export of uranium to countries with nuclear reactors. There was then (as there is now) talk of nuclear power for Australia. Which party had that manifesto commitment? It wasn’t the Greens – they would not exist until the early 1990s, brought into existence from one-betrayal-too-many from the Australian Labor Party. It wasn’t Labor. It wasn’t the Liberals (though there were Liberal figures pushing for renewables research and development.) Reader, it was the National Country Party, now known as the Nationals.
In 1977 the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stood at roughly 333 parts per million. Carbon dioxide traps heat on the earth’s surface. The more there is in the air, the more heat is trapped. Today, in 2026, the CO2 levels are at almost 100ppm above that – 430ppm. They are climbing faster and faster each year. More heat is trapped. More consequences for our past inaction – stretching back long before 1977 – pile up for present and future generations.
My two cents: There really is only so much you can do to innovate with the format of a rally like this, especially when time is tight. Tomorrow afternoon, at the Lion Arts Theatre, it will be easier to see if there is the kind of innovation in how activists hold events that is desperately required. Watch this space.
Transcript of interview with Extinction Rebellion person.
Marc – It’s 16th of April, 2026, I’m outside the Convention Centre. I’m talking to two men in business suits “representing” Santos. One of them has a cigar, as per photo. You’re from extinction rebellion. Why are you here today?
Ian – We’re here because Santos is the biggest company in South Australia. They’re having their AGM today. The shareholders will be here, and they are running programmes, projects around the country and overseas that are impacting the environment, that are impacting and overriding the rights of indigenous people. If anybody stands in front of them, they will take them to court. They’ve constantly taken indigenous people to court, and they keep appealing any decisions they lose. So we’re here to call them out. We’re here to support the First Nations people, but we’re also letting the public know that we believe Santos pays no tax. Hasn’t paid business tax for last 10 years. They pay very little money in donations to the government, and they always get what they want from government.
Marc – And what next for after today? How does the campaign against what Santos is doing continue?
Ian – Okay, in May, we have the Australian Energy Producers conference here in Adelaide that is the lobby group for the oil and gas industry in Australia. All the CEOs will be here, and government ministers will be here. They’ll be here for four days. So we’ll be here to disrupt them.
Marc – I seem to recall, at the last AEP meeting in Adelaide two or three years ago, there were protests that ended up with the Malinauskus government changing the laws. Any comment?
Ian -We’ll do whatever we have to do. We’ll keep doing it because they are not changing. The government is going down the path that Santos tells them to go down, and we’ll keep resisting.
Transcript of rest of Kirsty Bevan speech
It is so important that South Australians stand up and declare that we are not responsible for the climate crisis. As individuals, there are organisations and there are companies who are contributing every day to an accelerated changing climate, whether they’re digging that gas out of the ground which releases greenhouse gases, whether they’re burning it to turn it into liquid gas to export it overseas, they are releasing greenhouse gases which are all contributing to the climate crisis. This part is not under question.
So what do we do? We get them to pay, not the South Australian public. We get them to play for the crisis that’s resulting and our algal bloom, which the report we did at the Conservation Council, we submitted a report that showed that in the first 12 months conservatively, the economic impact of the bloom was around 250 million that’s a quarter of a billion dollars. And who bears the cost of that? We do.
Our role here in South Australia is so important, and we need two fronts at the federal level. We need to show that we are united and that they have a strong voice, that the federal government needs to stop any future expansions of gas and in South Australia, we need to make a firm stand to say that Santos is not a household name. We need to stop promoting Santos at our climate friendly events like the Tour Down Under. We need to stop promoting Santos in our universities and on public land, and we need to stand together to show that we won’t stand for it.
And the government needs to make a change. You can all join up to the Conservation Council’s programme. There’s some people around with their placards out, their hands up, come sign your name, be a part. Showing up to these events is what makes it really matter. But we will continue to hold the government to account. And I thank every single person here today for coming out. Thank you”
Forty six years ago the UK Chief Scientific Advisor wrote to the chief Civil Servant, saying that “a risk averse society might prefer nuclear power generation to fossil fuel burning.”
CNA’s Military Advisory Board finds that climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability and poses a serious threat to America’s national security.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 384ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that the idea that climate change would have profound geopolitical implications goes back to the late 50s. Then in 1980 you have William Barbat’s essay in “resource wars” in the CO2 newsletter.
The specific context was that the climate issue had broken through again because of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth and the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which had been published in February. The negotiations that were hotting up for a UNFCCC COP in Bali, at which “a roadmap to Copenhagen” (where everything would be sorted out) was to be agreed. These are the lies we tell ourselves.
What I think we can learn from this is that identifying a threat is one thing, doing anything about it is something else entirely.
What happened next: We went from Copenhagen to Paris to wherever the next “last chance to save the world” is supposed to be but I think actually, everyone’s kind of realised that the game is up. The cops will keep happening, sort of, but no one’s heart is in it.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Ana Unruh Cohen, DPhil, is a climate scientist and policy expert who has served in various roles in Congress, the White House, and NGOs during her 25-year career kindly agreed to write a commentary on the CO2 Newsletter, Vol. 1, no. 6. You can read other commentaries – and issues – here.
It is April in Washington, DC as I review the ‘message in a bottle’ from 1980 that has washed up on my screen thanks to the diligence of Marc Hudson of All Our Yesterdays. Fittingly much of the August-September 1980 CO2 Newsletter Vol 1, No 6 is devoted to an April hearing that same year in the Senate Committee on Energy and Resources.
Twenty-five years ago—in the fall of 2001—I arrived in DC as a freshly-minted DPhil in Earth science ready for a new challenge in the halls of Congress. After almost 5 years in the UK in the somewhat cloistered life of a graduate student, I was aware of the climate politics playing out on the international stage around the Kyoto Protocol and what had come up in the 2000 U.S. presidential election campaign between Al Gore and the ultimate winner George W. Bush. I was ready to dive in with my climate knowledge and eager to find a way to advance climate policy. I had no idea that more than 20 years before Senators were hearing similar warnings about the risks of climate change and the need to shift our energy generation from fossil fuels to carbon-free sources like solar and nuclear power. During my time in DC, historians have done more work on the development of climate science and climate policy that has sparked my own curiosity. But it wasn’t until I opened this volume of the CO2 Newsletter that I learned about the April 1980 Senate hearing.
Opponents of policies that would curb fossil fuel use and address climate change try to make the concern about global heating seem like something new—or for those that call it a hoax, something newly made up—but as the CO2 Newsletter documents back in the spring of 1980 Senators were asking “what we politicians and Congress need to do” about the CO2 problem. This wasn’t a hearing to just explore the science though. The senators already understood that climate impacts and energy decisions were two sides of the same coin. They heard from climate science luminaries George Woodwell, Wally Broecker, and William Kellogg, but also about energy policy from Gordon MacDonald of the MITRE Corporation and David Rose of MIT. That day the senators heard predictions that proved accurate like it taking between 10 to 20 years before warming due to carbon dioxide would be detected against natural fluctuations. Fifteen years later, in 1995, the second IPCC Assessment Report concluded that “the balance of evidence suggests there is a discernible human influence on global climate.” Dr. Woodwell suggested the CO2 problem might be “the preeminent international issue in management of resources during the early decades of the next century.” The gathering of world leaders in Paris 2015 to hammer out the UNFCCC Paris Agreement lends weight to that prediction.
In surveying the world in 2026, I’d argue that it is the most prevalent international resources issue, impacting energy, agricultural, biodiversity, immigration, and economic development around the world. One of the predictions from the 1980 hearing is still open: will the CO2 content of the atmosphere reach 500-600 ppm sometime in the first half of the 21st century? The answer to that depends on the twin focus of the Senate hearing, energy generation.
The energy debate in the Senate hearing, and captured in the rest of the CO2 Newsletter, feels as if it could be posts on social media today—the promise of nuclear power, the risks of nuclear proliferation, the need for domestic energy security, the elevation of natural gas as a cleaner fossil fuel, and the energy paradigm shift of solar power. In 1980 the U.S. was recovering from the economic consequences of the OPEC oil embargo. Sadly in 2026, the world is suffering from the economic consequences of the U.S. joining Israel in bombing Iran and Iran’s subsequent retaliation to close the Strait of Hormuz to almost all ships. Both events force re-evaluation of energy policy for economic security that have implications for the CO2 problem.
Luckily, we now have lithium-ion batteries, and their competitors, rapidly expanding the scope of possibility for both energy security and curbing carbon dioxide pollution. Batteries are noticeably absent from the Senate hearing; understandably so since the first commercial lithium-ion batteries were not sold until 1991. They are opening up alternatives in transportation the Senators and the expert witnesses did not foresee and answering concerns about solar variability that were raised in the spring of 1980. The world is in a race to avoid the potential catastrophic impacts of the climate crisis that the CO2 Newsletter records. Coupling battery technology with wind and solar gives us some hope of avoiding the worst while enhancing energy security.
While the reporting on the Senate hearing captured most of my attention, this issue of the CO2 Newsletter reports on other important climate issues that we are still grappling with today including attribution of weather events, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, and a report from the U.S. National Academy of Sciences on the “Economic and Social Aspects of Carbon Dioxide Increase” led by future Nobel-prize winning economist Thomas Schelling.
Looking back at the history of climate science and policy can trigger wistful thoughts of “what-if?” And relatable feelings of sadness about what we have lost and anger at fossil fuel and other vested interests that have fought to prevent climate action. Although it can be hard, we need to take the long-known climate science coupled with ever improving clean energy technologies and ask “what now?” We can never surrender our fight to curb carbon pollution and for clean energy to provide a future for all the people and amazing inhabitants of this one Earth.
lawyer and environmental activist David Buckel burned himself to death in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in what has been called the first self-immolation in the name of climate change.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 408ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that suicide as a political protest probably goes back a very very long way. The most famous 20th century example would be the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in 1963. There was a guy at the Pentagon in 1965 too.
The specific context was that it was clear from (at the absolute latest) the early 2000s that we were not, at a species level, going to take the steps necessary.
What I think we can learn from this is that we’re doomed.
What happened next: The protest didn’t lead to the growth of the kind of mass movements, capable of outlasting repression, co-optation, exhaustion that we need. Or needed. What we need now is a freaking time machine.
Vale David Buckel.
But this is not, in my opinion, the way forward. Suicide doesn’t build movements. If you need help, well, I don’t know what the numbers are in your country, but in the UK there’s the Samaritans.
The mining industry appeared to have all it needed for a decent online campaign: a new website, chest-beating media statements and one of those fancy Twitter hashtags, #australiansforcoal. What it got in return was merciless mockery.
The Minerals Council of Australia, which is backed by mining companies including industry giants BHP Billiton and Rio Tinto, launched Australians for Coal on Monday, as part of a PR campaign which will include TV advertisements and, naturally, political lobbying.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 398ppm. As of 2026 it is 428ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The broader context was that the mining industry had been trying to get people to love it for a very long time indeed, publicity campaigns, sponsorship of things like the TV programme Against The Wind with Jon English school textbooks, etc,
My personal favourite is 1991’s “Mining. It’s absolutely essential.”
They were going to launch one against the carbon tax in 1995 but in the end they didn’t need to. Then they had geared up in 2008-9 and again in 2010-11, to confuse people and to scare people against bringing in a carbon price.
The specific context was that this is the same year as Peabody, Advanced Energy for Life.
What I think we can learn from this is that mining companies and fossil fuel companies spend loads of money to get you to like them and to think of them as responsible corporate citizens. Perhaps the most clever and devious of these was the Mobil “advertorial” adverts.
What happened next: Well, as you’ll see, the MCA was relentlessly mocked, and I think realised that it was not so wise to present such an inviting target.
Meanwhile, any rational human being who understands the Keeling Curve and the history of resistance to anything to reduce the steepness of that curve, will feel despair and dread.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
The sixth edition of the CO2 Newsletter, published bi-monthly by American geologist William N. Barbat between 1979 and 1982 is live. You can download a pdf and see the full text here.
The eight page issue has a front page story asking “Can CO2-induced warming be detected yet?” Barbat does a good job (as ever) in being fair and balanced. At one point he notes
“Madden and Ramanthan theorized that a CO2-induced warming may have been delayed a decade by ocean thermal inertia or has been compensated by a cooling due to other factors. They noted, however, that “uncertainties remain because our current knowledge of climate does not allow us to distinguish between changes due to CO2 and those not to CO2. In order to prove or disprove the existence of the theoretically predicted effects of increasing levels of CO2, it may be necessary to monitor several variables and formulate arguments based on physical as well as statistical grounds to minimize the effect of the many uncertainties involved.”
There’s also an editorial, (highlighting the April 1980 Senate hearings) feedback from readers, excerpts from recent reports and a concluding article “A need for rational answers about energy.”
It remains heart-breaking, of course. Barbat’s editorial begins
“The hearings of April 3, 1980, before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources on the Effects of Carbon Dioxide Buildup in the Atmosphere represent a step forward in introducing the CO2 problem into U.S. energy policy. Prominent scientists familiar with the CO2 problem were asked “what we politicians and Congress need to do” by Senator Dale Bumpers. Senator Paul E, Tsongas noted that “Current U.S. energy policy has long-term implications, and what we are going to have to figure out is how bad will those impacts be.”
In a day or two, another excellent commentary on the newsletter will be published. Also, I will do a better job of highlighting the individual articles/nuggets in the issue over the coming weeks, before Vol. 2, no. 1 is published.
